Spectrum
by SouthSideStory
Summary: The life of Peeta Mellark in six colors. "Girl on fire, they're calling her. Katniss Everdeen, with a cloak of scarlet flames streaming down her back. And even though Peeta's dressed in the same burning coal costume, no one's naming him boy on fire. That tells him all he needs to know about his chances in this game. Who deserves to return to Twelve and who doesn't."
1. Chapter 1: Red

**CHAPTER ONE**

**Red**

Girl on fire, they're calling her. Katniss Everdeen, with a cloak of scarlet flames streaming down her back. And even though Peeta's dressed in the same burning coal costume, no one's naming him boy on fire. That tells him all he needs to know about his chances in this game. Who deserves to return to Twelve and who doesn't.

She's beautiful during her interview, flushed and nervous, dressed in a diamond-bright gown that reflects the stage lights back into the eyes of the audience, dazzling them. Luminous, unearthly, all the colors of fire refracted in the facets of the thousand gems Cinna has draped her in. Peeta watches her intrigue the Capitol people, capture their interest, and then he steps forward and wins them for her, whether she likes it or not.

Days later, he paints himself into the landscape. He's always been good at disappearing when he needs to. Good at making himself look like something he isn't (popular Peeta Mellark, everyone's friend, a happy baker's boy). Now he uses mud and grass and berries to melt into the bank, a hundred shades of dirt all over him. Everywhere except the wound on his leg, and Peeta doesn't need to look to know what color that is.

In the cave they trade stories and kisses, shy touches pressed back and forth in the shadows. Until he wakes from a sleep syrup haze to find Katniss hurt. Blood trickling down her face, so thick and bright he could paint with it.

At the Cornucopia Cato dies a drawn-out death, while Peeta watches the life seeping out of him, slowed only by the makeshift tourniquet that will lose him a leg. Then the announcement, the nightlock berries, and her, the love he swore to die for: Katniss Everdeen, the girl on fire, though to him she'll always be the girl in the red plaid dress.


	2. Chapter 2: Orange

**CHAPTER TWO**

**Orange**

Peeta wakes Katniss to see the sunset. The sky is beautiful, but all he watches is the expression on her face.

Later, he will hang on to this memory, because it's one that escaped the cameras, the bugs, and they can't use it against him. Something real and honest that Snow never demanded.

Doctors come with syringes full of acidic orange liquid. He knows what it is, remembers this same feeling from the 74th Games, the burning like fire as the stinger (needle) breaks the skin and venom rushes into his bloodstream. And the fear that follows. Fear that makes him cry, makes him beg, makes him vomit.

He sees a dog with the eyes of that poor boy he killed in the first minutes of the Games (a sacrifice to prove his worth to the Careers), and it's fitting that they meet again at the Cornucopia, the place where Peeta snapped his neck. He sees his mother. Her once-pretty face twisted in anger, screaming. Calling him worthless, an idiot, a failure. Peeta is smaller than her, and she's hitting him. Now he's bigger, and he could stop her, he could knock her down with one blow and she'd never raise a hand to him again, but he's everything she says he is and he can't do it.

And in the middle of it all, Katniss. The girl everyone loves, the girl he loves, the girl who never loved him back. Dropping a tracker jacker nest on him, attacking him after the interviews, leading him into the forcefield. Kissing him for the cameras she knew about and kissing Gale for the cameras she didn't. Katniss, the girl on fire setting fire to everything, burning down Twelve and his family with it. Father, Mother, Brother, Brother. Up in smoke because of her, and she isn't even human, they say. She's a mockingjay, a mutt, a monster, and he hates her almost as much as he's terrified of her.

Peeta used to see all the colors there are, but now everything is bright and shining and orange.


	3. Chapter 3: Yellow

**CHAPTER THREE**

**Yellow**

It's spring in District Twelve, and the flowers are blooming. Soft and sweet smelling and butter yellow. Katniss tends to them herself, protecting the gentle blossoms from weeds, insects. Anything that might threaten her evening primroses. If when she comes inside Peeta notices that her cheeks are pink, her eyes swollen, he doesn't remark on it.

That night, in bed, he traces shapes and figures on the slender plane of his wife's back. Fingers sliding across her patchwork skin. Olive and smooth here, unburnt. Pink and too-shiny there, old scars ribboning her body. Until Katniss turns and faces him in the dark, grey eyes alive with something he can't place. Maybe Peeta should know her every mood and expression by now, but so much about her remains a mystery to him. She's still the girl he can't quite reach, even when she's in his arms.

On good days he finds this exciting. Peeta loves that he discovers new things about his wife after ten years of marriage. On bad days he wonders if he's ever really known her at all.

Sometimes he has to parse the shiny memories from the dull. The real from the not real. Katniss helps. Patient, gentle, she explains small truths to him and tells stories. Rewriting the narrative that Capitol doctors engraved onto his memory. She helps him regain little bits and pieces of the Peeta Mellark who died in that detention center cell.

Tonight she talks about the bread. Reminds him that, for the price of two loaves and a blow from his mother, he saved her life. Katniss tells him about the dandelion she found the next day. How he and that simple yellow flower gave her hope.


	4. Chapter 4: Green

**CHAPTER FOUR**

**Green**

Everywhere he looks, Peeta sees nothing but trees. That's the only thing the Quarter Quell arena has in common with his first, because everything else is bigger, meaner, and more deadly than the 74th.

This stinking jungle is a mess of traps and mutts. Twenty-four victors all locked in together, racing around a globe that tick-tocks its way to their destruction. Poison, blood, tidal wave, monkeys, and murderers. A clock that strikes twelve with lightning. Peeta hates this arena more than he's ever hated anything in his life, and he can just picture the Gamemakers in some sterile white room pulling the strings that strangle them all.

Years later, he smiles and kisses Katniss on the cheek as she heads out into the woods. He knows the days she misses Gale, not as a lover, but as a friend and companion. A hunting partner. Because however much Peeta cares for her, this is one place he won't follow his wife. He's always been too loud, scaring the game away with his heavy-footed tread.

But the truth is that there are too many trees and too much green and the forest is ruined for him.


	5. Chapter 5: Blue

**CHAPTER FIVE**

**Blue**

Their daughter finds the dress in a box in the attic where she shouldn't have been looking in the first place. She comes downstairs wearing it. Says it's pretty in a way and doesn't it fit her just right?

Of course she doesn't recognize it; they've asked their children not to watch their Games.

All Peeta can see is his wife, half a lifetime ago, volunteering for Prim. Boarding the train with him and heading to the slaughter. Skinny and sixteen and scared but too stubborn to much show it.

Katniss goes as pale as her olive skin will allow when she sees their child in her old dress. Tells her in a firm voice to take it off this instant, put it back where she found it and stop snooping through things that aren't hers. Later, Peeta goes to their daughter. Confused, hurt, and so young (reaping age for three more years, he thinks for an instant, before he remembers that there are no reapings anymore), and he explains as best he can. She doesn't understand, not really, and he can only hope that she never will.

Katniss wakes him three times in the night. Screaming, crying, babbling nonsense about Prim and Rue and the children she killed and are the children all right?

The next morning Peeta wakes to the smell of smoke drifting in through the open window. He looks outside and sees Katniss sitting in the grass before a small fire, and he knows without asking that she's burning her blue reaping dress.


	6. Chapter 6: Violet

**CHAPTER SIX**

**Violet**

Peeta is too young to remember the first time Mother hits him. But there are plenty of strikes that follow and he remembers them well enough.

He goes to school with bruises on his cheek, his arms, under his clothes. When teachers or friends ask questions he smiles and tells some lie about falling or fighting with his brothers. And he's so charming, so good at spinning a story, even then, that they believe him. Or maybe they just see what they want to see and Peeta's lies have nothing to do with it.

Mother smacks his face when he burns the bread, but it's worth it to see Katniss (gaunt, hair stringy, eyes hollow, starving) run off with the loaves stuffed up under her shirt. She never thanks him, never says one word in greeting until the day her sister is reaped, but Peeta likes to think it meant something to her. That he means something to her.

He's not in love with Katniss Everdeen. He knows that, really, but at night when he's alone and can't sleep because of the ache in his ribs (or black eye, or busted lip) it comforts him to think of the girl in the red plaid dress who sang the valley song so pretty. Love-but-not hurts almost as much as hate, and over the years Peeta finds that he likes having at least one pain that belongs to him.

When he holds his own daughter in his arms, and later his son, he doesn't understand how any parent could do to their child what his mother did to him. How you could leave marks on tender, little boy skin. Sometimes he pretends that this is just another Capitol lie. The ghost of tracker jacker venom playing on his fears, making him think things that aren't true. But the memories are dull and the bruises were violet and he knows real from not real.


End file.
